Short sale bans have been implemented across the world, yet oddly most stocks across the world have continued to fall... strange. We suspect that perhaps stocks fall because they aren't worth as much as they used to. Or at least that there is serious risk/uncertainty that they won't be. Thus maybe rather than ban short sellers, perhaps we should be asking them for more detail on WHY they are selling various companies short... we might learn something from these evil market participants.

Pershing Square manager, and professional short-seller, William Ackman makes this point below, having this to say about the SEC banning short sales:

One regulator, which Ackman believes has not done the right thing, is the SEC. He criticized its temporary ban on the short selling of financial stocks and a handful of other troubled companies, saying it did "more to destroy investor confidence than any other action taken by the SEC in the past five months." He called the move a "market manipulation at the behest of the SEC." He went even further to say that the SEC would be best to ask the short sellers which companies they are targeting to help sound the alarms on shaky companies.

"People that identified problems should be heralded or at least listened to," he added.

The activist investor also divulged his new long investments, Wachovia Corp. and American International Group Inc. He noted that the two embattled company's are his first financial sector long investments in five years.

I agree, short sellers like Ackman probably have a lot of things to say about what problems might arise next. Perhaps we shouldn't take away their incentive to spot landmines. Some short-selling on US housing prices (let's just imagine) three years ago might have reduced the extent of the bubble and the damage it caused. It's better to learn of problems bit by bit before everything explodes, rather than get sudden huge surprises from banks once they can no longer hide the damage. Banning short sales in the belief that it will cure market malaise is similar to banning doctors who provide negative diagnoses to their patients and thinking that somehow this will cure cancer or at least lessen the damaging effects of disease. We can run wild with similes.

More risky than pursuing blockbusters is not to pursue them, to condemn
your enterprise to a lifetime of slave labor harvesting the long tail
of micro-opportunities rather than imagining, pursuing, and marketing
the global solution to an important, widely shared problem.... A blockbuster brand is not a one hit wonder. It is a gift that keeps on
giving. Remember Intel's Pentium chip. Or look at the seven Harry
Potter books and five companion movies. Adding DVD and merchandise
sales, theme parks, etc., Advertising Age valued the Potter economy at
$15 billion.

I'm not a big fan of that style of online journalism where you bash some mainstream media outlet for not "getting it". But man, what's with this WaPo article on how some businesses are using blogs to market themselves. You know, like they have a blog right on their site! Sometimes even the CEO dictates a post to their secretary. Seriously.

And then somehow Jason Calacanis, apropos of zilch, gets quoted in the piece. Seriously, check it out and see if you can figure out why he's in the article. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Honestly, the only way you can tell the story wasn't written in 2002 is that the story doesn't start with the line "Blog, a contraction of 'web' and 'log'..."

A couple weeks ago, The New York Times ran a pretty interesting piece about vicious web trolls. Kinda disturbing in a "kids of today" manner, but it didn't actually seem timely. (I was also surprised by how little attention the article got actually... nobody even emailed it to me!)

The thing is: trolling is basically dead.

Perhaps I should say "casual trolling is dead".

It used to be easy to take a shot at someone with a bitchy, mean comment. It was totally trivial to participate in early iterations of social software by using handles that didn't reveal any personal info. Yahoo chat let you come up with multiple screennames and profiles pretty easily. In 1996, my friends and I published a zine (kind of like a physical version of a blog, for you young'uns). Our little website is still up, but mainly it was a print pub.

Man, we spammed every frigging usenet group there was promoting ourselves. Like seriously: We put up a post about ourselves on newsgroups about French cooking. Sure, some folks got pissed off, but big deal, what were they going to do? Actually, a friend of mine did at some point get a warning from his dial-up ISP to knock it off. Part of it was that nobody had online identities back in those days. Sure, you had handles and nicknames, but rarely was there any of "you" online. So right there, it was much easier to be a jerk and get away with it. You didn't have any reputation to care about. Nothing that could get damaged. Everyone was the invisible man.

My spamming days ended pretty much as soon as they started. And by the middle of high school, I was a reformed mind. Actually, I think our spamming was limited to one night of mischief while doing copy editing. And I've never done it since. No regrets though. No regrets.

Besides spamming, there was a lot of great mischief to be had back in message board days. People would post requests like: "What's your favorite way to make antipasto?" or "Can anyone help me with this paper on bizarre facts about the assassination of JFK?" I used to love posing as an expert and writing up long-winded responses. The goal was to maintain a veneer of credulousness, while pushing the limits of absurd content. It was a fun game and I was good duping people. AGAIN: I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. (buzz off if you were planning on saying something about how now I do that professionally)

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These days I'm an exemplar web citizen. I try to contribute thoughtful content as much as possible. I respect others, and I'm generally encouraging. Some people use their blogs to take shots at others. I don't. It's lame. I'm really not a hater in any way, shape or form.

But from time to time, one does get the urge. The problem is that it's too hard.

So much of web interactions are with real names. It is impossible to anonymously lop shots at people. Absolutely impossible. Say you see a picture of someone doing something that you find totally lame or cliche. You want to tell them off, but not so much that you actually want to stand behind your comments. It's impossible. There's just no way to do it. A few months ago, I wanted to make a lighthearted (but potentially feeling-hurting) comment towards someone on Twitter, but there was just no way to do it without them knowing.

Sometimes, I want to make a comment on someone's blog saying "sorry sir, but you're an idiot and here's why...". People just need that sometimes. But it's frequently too much of a pain in the ass to do in a way where your tracks are completely covered. By the time you get around to figuring it out, your motivation to make the comment is usually gone. It's especially tough if the comment is on a site where normally you'd want to comment with nice things to say.

This might be a good thing... but sometimes someone needs to be told that their breath smells bad (it's for their own good) and sometimes the best way to tell them that is to leave an anonymous post-it note on their desk. If someone had to go through ridiculous hurdles to leave the post-it note, or if there were no mechanism for leaving it anonymously, the person with bad breath would suffer for it -- as would everyone else.

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More and more, internet content is moving towards brightly lit neighborhoods of the web. Facebook is the big one, but there are others as well. Blogs are increasingly using federated comment systems, like Disqus, which push people to claim a real identity to leave a comment.

You still have your hate-filed message boards, like the one mentioned in the above NYT article. But they're kind of their own ghetto on the web, without much connection to the outside world.

All this is good, but sometimes (rarely) you just want to watch out. And it's getting tougher and tougher.

Anytime someone rights about online video advertising, it's like they're compelled to say something along the lines of: Everyone agrees that pre-roll sucks, but it's the most effective.

Pre-roll, of course, are the short, 15-30 second commercials frequently shown in advance of the clip you're trying to watch.

So my question is: Am I the only person who doesn't find it that annoying? I mean, sure, like anyone else, I'd rather get to the content. But if it's something I actually want to watch, it's not much of a deal breaker.

Apparently there's a social bookmarking service called ma.gnolia. com. Ok, not quite fair. I've heard of the site and visited it. Nobody really uses it though. ReadWriteWeb calls it "one of the most popular second tier social bookmarking services on the web", which is brilliant and hilarious, especially since even the "first tier" (ha!!) social bookmarking services are totally unknown to most people.

Wan't proof? The top links at Delicous (the most popular one), currently have to do with stuff like fonts and AJAX web design, which is all you need to know.

Anyway, Ma.gnolia.com is going open source. Meaning, you can download the Ma.gnolia.com source code and install it on your own server. As Rex Sorgatz pointed out recently, this is the kind of move a company makes once they're on the verge of irrelevance. Reddit recently went open source. Netvibes kind of did.

This isn't to bash open source web apps: Wordpress (the popular blogging platform) has done it to fine effect. The difference is that they started that way and cultivated that. Oh and of course Firefox is a killer example. But hard to see turning your code loose onto the world as a major injection of life.

Actually, the above-linked post from ReadWriteWeb is pretty telling. Read the part under "Why Ma.gnolia is cool" and you'll soon realize exactly what's wrong with this company.

I've stopped getting MSNBC spam, but it seems some spammers are still trying the 'click on this BREAKING NEWS' strategy of getting you to click on a malicious link. However the newest entrants in this game don't know which news agency they want to spoof (the sender is Top News Agency) and they're not very creative with their headlines.

Here's something crazy from Nick Gogerty: "The FDIC is the 7th fastest growing website in traffic according to compete.com. You know something is going on when FDIC.Gov beats out Jibjab.com in an election year."

That was a couple weeks ago, and notice it's fastest growing site -- so perhaps the FDIC has gone from two regular visitors to ten. Actually, the site had 1.8 million visits in July, which isn't bad.

Over at Hitwise an interesting look at interesting, among web searchers for Heelys. Heelys, of course, is the maker of wheel-mounted shoes. Last week it was announced the Skechers, the maker of never-have-been-cool sneaker mounted a takeover offer for the company. Anyway, search traffic -- an interesting way of gaging brand value online.

Back when Twitter was down all the time, there was a lot of talk about the danger of launching a third party service that rlies on the site to be up. But what about a site that relies on Twitter to be down? Like the awesome Is Twitter Down?, which lets you know if, well, Twitter is down, or if it's just you that can't access it. Yeah, Twitter's new found reliability hasn't been a positive development.

What is This?

The Stalwart is a blog written by Joseph Weisenthal, covering such topics as stocks, business, economics, politics, technology, gambling, chess, poker, economics, current events, music, math, Chinese food, science, randomness, kurtosis, sports, evolutionary fitness, and anything else of the author's choosing. The words contained herein are the author's own, not affiliated with any other firm or employer.